Some people are even asking, is college worth it?
To answer this question, I sat down
with Rich DeMillo, director of the Center for 21st Century
Universities at Georgia Tech to explore the value proposition
of a college education.
In the last few years in particular it seems,
this conversation about return on investment college value
has really come into the fore.
What would you say are the primary reasons for that,
and what is the conversation right now?
Well, the price part of the equation
has been pretty noticeable.
If you look at the national polling that's
taking place on this, parents are concerned
about the price of college.
They're concerned that the investment
that they're making in higher education
is going to be repaid.
A generation ago, two generations ago,
when public education was free, or pretty close to free,
those questions, I think, didn't have as much traction.
But now, you see tuition going up
at twice the rate of inflation, student debt going
through the roof, a lot of coverage in the national media
about whether or not the debt is going to be covered by income.
And so, I just think it's on everyone's mind.
I think part of the big message here
is how quickly top rated institutions have pivoted
on this question, and made significant investments, not
only Georgia Tech, but our peers and our competitors.
One of the things you hear a lot about
is assessing value of a particular major,
as much as it may be a particular college.
So what's your take, and, I think,
also maybe your advice to a family
as they're sitting down and considering college,
and they're looking, not only maybe at the particular place,
but what the student would actually study?
That seems to be one of the driving factors.
If you're dealing with an institution that
can't explain what skills you're going to learn,
then that's not a good sign for what's
going to happen post graduation.
That doesn't mean that you have to be
in computer science, doesn't mean
you have to be in an engineering discipline,
or something that has a very specific vocational component
to it.
But I would be, if I were a parent,
I would be wary of an institution that
can't explain exactly what is going
to be learned in the classroom.
When you think a little bit about generations
and the conversations, now, that parents
are having with their students, and you alluded
to this earlier, the conversation really
has changed from, maybe, how a current parent went
about choosing and selecting a college,
to now their son or daughter is doing that.
What's your perspective, and how would you
help a family have that conversation in a really
healthy, logical way?
Students talk to each other a lot.
The power of social media is that they compare notes,
and they compare notes about institutions.
And the power of a brand, which has always
been the thing that carried institutions
through tough times, up times, down time.
The power of the brand, I think, is fading into these questions
that we were talking about a few minutes ago.
What am I going to learn in classroom?
What is the value of this degree?
What has happened to other graduates of this institution?
So there's a set of questions that-- they're not
the kind of questions a US News and World
Report is going to ask.
They're really questions about, what have I gotten out
of this four year experience?
What is a reasonable amount of debt?
What, in your opinion, is a good way to go about saying,
here's what it's going to cost.
Here's, to the best of our ability,
what we believe this will lead to.
How do you even start the process?
The gut feel of accruing a total amount of debt that's
bigger than you expected first year income strikes me
as a bad idea.
So if an institution is going to require
me to put on my credit cards in a non-subsidized loan
that amount of money, I'm going to want to know, down the line,
do I have a feasible way of repaying that?
And you see student after student
that just accrues two, three, four, five,
10 times that amount.
And you know that a 10 times annual income, it's
going to be very difficult to repay those loans.
Shifting gears a little bit, going back to this conversation
surrounding value and in return on investment,
a family has gone through the submission process,
they've applied, a student has been
admitted to several schools, including one or two
of those being elite institutions that
have a big brand behind them, and highly selective.
As you look at that, and thinking about advice
to the families in this regard, what
would you say about the importance
of making that choice, especially
if it means incurring a sizable amount debt?
So it's a hard proposition to resist, right?
If you get accepted by an elite institution,
most families are going to look at that
and say, well that is a leg up from my son or daughter
that's going to stay within their whole life.
And it's probably true.
It's probably true that they get an advantage out
of going to an Ivy League institution,
or to a Georgia Tech, or any other highly ranked
institution.
It turns out, though, the data shows that it's not
the deciding advantage.
For example, it matters less where you go to school, then
the places that you applied.
This is a piece of the economic data that is not widely known
among parents.
But it turns out that, if you have
a son or daughter with high aspirations,
regardless of which place they go to, if they do well,
they're going to do well in later life.
So things like your familiarity with the quality
of institutions, your aspirations,
how well you do once you get to an institution,
those turn out to be the deciding factors.
What would be your advice to students
to, once they do arrive on campus, about some
of things they can do during their college career
to set them up for finishing?
Because, to your point, it's not always necessarily even
just about where you graduate from,
what diploma you hang on your wall, but the experiences
that you're building, the exposure that you have,
the network, et cetera, during your time.
So what would you say then?
Acquiring skills, this is all about, regardless
of what happens in the classroom,
acquiring a set of skills that are going
to carry you going forward.
I have a son who spent his entire undergraduate career
interning for newspapers.
It almost didn't matter what he majored in,
because when he graduated from college,
he was a seasoned journalist.
He was a seasoned professional, and had
an advantage over almost everyone else that
was coming out of college.
Someone who comes to a place like Georgia Tech,
it takes advantage of our entrepreneurial programs,
or walks down the street to General Assembly
and takes some courses, or participates in the start
up activities on campus is going to have that body of knowledge
to rely on, regardless of what they study.
In conclusion, just coming back to the initial question of
is the college worth it?
And with all of the implications surrounding that question,
how do you respond?
Well, the data is really clear that there's still
a premium for a college degree.
Your chances of doing well financially, professionally,
in later life are enhanced by a factor of two or three
if you persist in college to get a degree.
That being said, it matters how well you do.
So an average student who kind of coasts
through a program that's not very challenging
is going to do less well than someone
takes a challenging program and does extremely well.
And that's always the balance the you have to strike.
If you know that you're going to require these skills when you
graduate, you should be, as a student,
focusing on acquiring those skills in the most
efficient way possible.
If you try to slide through on that,
it's not going to serve you well later on.
Okay.
Thank you, again.
Good, thank you.